CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The decline of pollinators is a widespread problem in todays agriculture, affecting the yield of many crops.Improved pollination management is therefore essential, and honey bee colonies are often used to improvepollination levels. In this work, we applied a spatially explicit agent-based model for the simulation of croppollination by honey bees under different management scenarios and landscape configurations. The model includes 1) a representation of honey bee social dynamics; 2) an explicit representation of resource dynamics; 3) aprobabilistic approach to the foraging site search process; and 4) a mechanism of competition for limited resources. We selected 60 sample units from the rural landscape of the Chilean region with the largest applegrowing area and evaluated the effectiveness of different pollination strategies in terms of number of visitsand number of pollinated flowers per hectare of apple crops. Finally, we analyzed how the effects of thesepractices depended on the structure of adjacent landscapes. Higher colony density per hectare in the focal cropincreased the number of honey bee visits to apple inflorescences; however, the effects were nonlinear for rates ofpollinated flowers, suggesting that there is an optimum beyond which a greater number of honey bees does notsignify increased levels of crop pollination. Furthermore, high relative proportions of mass flowering crops andnatural habitats in the landscape led to a decrease in honey bee densities in apple fields in landscapes with highrelative cover of apple orchards (dilution effect). Our results indicate that for optimal crop pollination, strategiesfor management of pollinator species should consider the modulating effects of the surrounding landscape onpollination effectiveness. This model could thus be a useful tool to help farmers, beekeepers, and policy-makersplan the provision of pollination services, while also promoting the biodiversity and sustainability ofagroecosystems.

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